Remembering Woodstock

by Bennett, Andy

• ISBN13: 9780754607137
• ISBN10: 0754607135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-15
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Ltd

Summary

The Woodstock festival of 1969, which featured such groups and artists as the Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is remembered as much for its 'bringing together' of the counter-cultural generation as for the music performed. The event represented a milestone in the use of music as a medium for political expression, while simultaneously acting as a springboard for the more expressly commercial of rock and pop events which were to follow. In the thirty years since the festival took place, Woodstock has become the subject of many books, magazine articles and documentaries which have served to mythologise the event in the public imagination.These different aspects of the Woodstock festival are discussed in this wide ranging book which brings together a number of established and new writers in the fields of sociology, media studies and popular music studies. Each chapter explores a specific aspect of the Woodstock festival and its continuing significance in relation to the music industry, the rock festival 'tradition', sixties nostalgia and the cultural impact of popular music.

Author Biography

Dave Allen is Deputy Head of the Department of Creative Technologies at the University of Portsmouth Andy Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey Gerry Bloustien is a Senior Lecturer and Program Director in Communication, Culture and Media, at the University of South Australia Dave Laing was formerly Reader in Media Studies at the University of Westminster and popular music journalist Country Joe McDonald has been a songwriter and performing musician since the mid-1960s George McKay is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK Allan F. Moore is Professor of Popular Music, and Head of the Department of Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey John Street is Reader in Politics at the University of East Anglia Simon Warner is Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Music at the University of Leeds Sheila Whiteley is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester. She is also Associate Dean (Academic Enterprise) for the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences

Table of Contents

List of figures and table	vii
Notes on contributors	viii
General Editor's preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xii
Abbreviations and acronyms	xiii
Introduction	xiv
Andy Bennett
The three Woodstocks and the live music scene	1	(17)
Dave Laing
`1, 2, 3 What are we fighting 4?' Music, meaning and `The Star Spangled Banner'	18	(11)
Sheila Whiteley
`This is your Woodstock': Popular memories and political myths	29	(14)
John Street
`Everybody's happy, everybody's free': Representation and nostalgia in the Woodstock film	43	(12)
Andy Bennett
Reporting Woodstock: Some contemporary press reflections on the festival	55	(20)
Simon Warner
The contradictory aesthetics of Woodstock	75	(15)
Allan F. Moore
`Unsafe things like youth and jazz': Beaulieu Jazz Festivals (1956--61), and the origins of pop festival culture in Britain	90	(21)
George McKay
A public transition: Acoustic and electric performances at the Woodstock festival	111	(16)
Dave Allen
Still picking children from the trees? Reimagining Woodstock in twenty-first-century Australia	127	(19)
Gerry Bloustien
Afterword Country Joe McDonald remembering Woodstock	146	(8)
Country Joe McDonald
Dave Allen
Index	154